KACHARAGADLA

Creating a culture of innovation is flat-out hard work. What makes it hard work is that you have to be, in essence,  focused on serendipity .  The juxtaposition of “focus” and “serendipity” is paradoxical, and tricky to maintain as a frame of mind personally and in an organization. Even though it’s hard work, it’s not exceptionally complicated, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. When it comes to a culture of innovation, consultants and thought leaders have a way of adding more complication than clarity. Here, I hope to be an exception, with the following list of ways to break this down so you can get to work. 1. Honor Thy Accidents.   While it’s great to hit what you aim for, to make the metaphorical slam dunk, success comes at least as often from responding well when your efforts land you somewhere other than your intended target. If that “somewhere else” is embraced by the public in a way that has commercial value, please stop thinking of it as an accident, somethi

When does a hobby become a business? It sounds like a simple question to answer. But, that’s not always the case. The IRS has rules for what qualifies as a business, and your entrepreneurial idea might not be making the cut. Why should you know the difference between hobby and business? Whether your venture is a hobby or a business affects your tax liability. If the IRS declares it’s a hobby, you can’t deduct business losses and expenses on your tax return. You can only deduct your hobby expenses up to the amount of income you earn. Let’s say you want to start a T-shirt printing business. You spend $1,000 on a new screen printing press. In your first year, you only make $50 in sales. The IRS audits you and decides your company is a hobby. Hobby loss rules dictate that you can only deduct up to $50 you earned. If you deduct  business expenses  when you’re not a real company, you can get some heavy penalties. Treating a hobby tax deduction as a business tax deduction on you

(From left to right) Saiteja Veera, co-founder, Vijay Sharma, CEO & co- founder, Sudheendra Chilappagari co-founder & head of product, and Rishabh Kaul, co-founder & head of demand.  Pic Credit: Belong For a long time, hiring in India (or for that matter anywhere in the world) meant candidates would have to be active on job portals and scout through the various jobs listed. It would then be up to the recruiter of a company to go through all the CVs and schedule interviews with potential candidates and the entire process took around four to five months. As companies run into increasingly competitive talent markets, recruiting costs and cycles are escalating. To overcome these challenges and help businesses meet their goals, recruiting teams need radically new capabilities and technologies, something Bengaluru-based startup Belong is helping companies to achieve. Basically, the premise is simple: for an employer and potential employee to connect with each other they

A photo taken by But Natural Photography’s Sujata Setia. Photo courtesy of Sujata Setia. With the onset of e-commerce platforms, new avenues have opened up for the average Indian consumer to simplify buying photography equipment – something that wasn’t possible for many ten years ago. As demand spikes, does this make now the time for entrepreneurs to cash in on the new phenomenon of the photography business? Six years ago Indian papers were reporting on the sudden rise in popularity of photography as art, something art-loving Indians had never before considered as an alternative to the country’s well-established love of paintings, and indeed it was the talk of the galleries: were photographs the new thing in high-value works of art? Today, the market has moved beyond being a simple buyer’s market for finished works. People want to learn how to take their own photos. And they’re willing to pay. “The European market started to saturate,” says But Natural Photography’s Sujat

More and more people are realizing that smart design can be a source of competitive advantage, but there are some challenges. What is the future of design? Unlike technology, design seldom follows a neat curve. When it comes to questions of style, it’s hard to chart steady improvements. At the moment, however, design does seem likely to become an even more powerful business driver—provided it isn’t undone by its own popularity. In a number of sectors, executives are becoming more and more aware that smart design can be a shortcut to competitive advantage. The growth of Starbucks and the rise of Apple are two of the most familiar stories about the power of good design, but a number of industries have been similarly transformed by an idea that was less technically novel than packaged in a more appealing way. One somewhat less familiar case in point is retail design. Shopping has been reinvented a number of times through design, from the arcades and department stores of